Hotrod Desktop Repair.

[koØm]

I don't know if this goes in the "Boat Anchor-Homebrew section or, the Computor-Electronics section.

History: I have two identical 3.5 inch Hard Drives, one has an boot-able backup image from my laptop (Windows XP Home) and the other drive was from a Win XP-Pro Desktop whos system drive failed and I could not repair it or extract data.

An associate with connections to a local university IT department was cleaning out his workspace and, he came accross a dual core Motherboard (GigaByte G-41-M); swearing it was good and he had upgraded a buddies Desktop Unit, he gave me the board, CPU, and Memory.

I threw the parts in an ATX case with power supply and the first thing that I noticed was that the LED Mouse had power as soon as the PS was plugged into the wall; 5 volts was being fed through out the board to the PS-2 mouse at all times. This was the hinky-est Computer system that I ever touched

I placed the drives in the case and loaded Vista, the Computer Dual Booted to "Vista" and 'An Earlier Version ofWindows'. Computers do the darnest things when you don't expect them to.

I was able to boot into either system until the secondary system had an error "Windows\System32\Config\SYS\ was damaged or missing". I really did not need to boot into that Win Home Edition.

My OS is installed on the once-failed HD that is now failing again. I tried to Ghost an image of the HD to another unit but I getg a error, "Cannot Load MFT".

Any suggestions on how to fix the boot sector on the XP home (the recovery files are load in a separate partition) and how to Clone the operating system drive which is failing daily ?

Also used R-Drive Image but, it created a same size partition on the new HD as on the old HD and left 400 Gigs of un-allocated space.

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[koØm]

The time that I put into this "project" could have been used in a more efficient and effective manner but, there's something inside of me that cannot walk away from a piece of useful electronics, I'm like "Bob the Builder"; Can he fix it? Yes he can!"

After hours of cloning, swapping, repairing, checkdsk /f, changing the BIOS, I ended up with a box that suddenly that would only boot to an old XP installation that could not be activated.

I put a entirely different HD in the machine, re-partitioned it and loaded an operating system, that is what I should have done instead of spending 8 to 10 man-hours jerking with it.

That was time I could have / should have spent on the radio, the bands have been open this week, talked all over the place on 40 meters during the cloning / disk repairing operations.

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[koØm]

Gettin' Geeky Widdit!

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[koØm]

This computer was built to make all the geeky girls cream their jeans.

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[KG4NEL]

Oh man. Acrylic cases with LEDs.

Memories of 2003 and LAN parties.

[n2ize]

I like the clear plastic case. I used to have colored CCFL lamps in mine.

[N8OBM]

As odd as it may sound, When windows and windows based tools have trouble reading a drive that the hardware can see, Try using linux. I had a friend bring me a drive that windows would not read and that the Geek squad at the local best buy pronounced as dead. I put the drive in an external drive box, plugged it into my Ubuntu Studio laptop and voila, I copied the files to my internal drive.

Knoppix is also really useful. If you haven't played with it, you really should

Archie N8OBM

[WØTKX]

Try the cool tools in the Universal Boot CD. Recommended for Resurrections..